Imagine transporting ten thousand used books from San Francisco to Puerto Morelos, Mexico, and then trying to clear customs without the proper paperwork. In September 1997 that was my first exposure to the world of owning and operating a bookstore in Mexico—Alma Libre Libros.
Yes, I eventually managed to clear customs. I can only believe that after three weeks of staring at two hundred boxes of books on their dock, some customs official decided to clear the deck and release them. Before leaving our nine to five jobs in San Francisco and making the move, we struggled with the protocol of how to bring the books in. Our contractor had lived there forever and at long last, we followed his advice. "Don't bother to go to the Mexican Consulate before you come down," he told me and my husband. "Just ship the books and see what happens. It's Mexico."
Although we could have received better advice, this wait and see attitude did do the trick. But clearing customs was only the beginning of the challenge to set up shop. We'd planned for years to be at this point in opening the store. Three years prior to moving we shopped for used books on weekends at garage sales, thrift shops, and Friends of the Library sales around San Francisco and even ran classified ads for books. We eventually ran out of space in our Half Moon Bay home and rented a Bekins Storage unit in nearby Redwood City to house them.
I attended a weekend workshop at a community college on how to start a used bookstore, and decided to follow a tried and true formula—for the US at least—on how to realize our dream. We set up the store on a Buy-Sell-Trade basis which would allow readers to trade in used books for store credit. It would generate new titles, buck up inventory, and allow customers to read new books for little, if any, cost.
We learned what percent to have in hardback versus paperback; how much fiction to carry along with mystery, thrillers, sci-fi, metaphysics, art, hobbies—up to twenty genres. Living near San Francisco proved fortunate in that we found an eclectic, wide-ranging mix of titles and customers commented on our selection.
Thinking ahead we contacted our eventual landlord two years before the move and asked if there were any shops on the town zocalo that might be coming available. He soon advised that something was opening up. We started paying rent on shop space in January 1996 even though we knew we couldn't escape San Francisco till late 1997. But location is important. On that note, one might ask why Puerto Morelos? (Easy commute). And we liked the idea of facing the town square.
Our work was cut out for us soon after we arrived from our 4,500 drive from Northern California down to southern Mexico. We immediately began the process for our FM3, or working papers, through a notary. Although it took only three months for our immigration certification to be completed, it felt like a lifetime as at times we had to make daily trips to the notary's office in Cancun to give and retrieve information due to his failure to properly inform us on various procedures.
Meanwhile, the books sat in our yet unopened store. We had the walls painted a bright mustard yellow and the window trims painted Maya Azul, a lovely shade of turquoise that mirrored the color of the Caribbean Sea.
Our next trauma was having bookshelves made. We needed to accommodate both hardback and paperback and decided to go floor-to-ceiling in pine. As luck would have it, by the time our carpenter purchased the wood, torrential rains had railed for two weeks straight. It was now early December and we were chomping at the bit to start alphabetizing and sorting books, all ten thousand of them. As we alphabetized, the carpenter began to bring in shelves but told us not to stack books on them for two days to let the wood dry completely. We waited, then cut strips of cardboard and tacked it onto the shelves first—for safety's sake—in case the shelves were still damp.
After four tiresome days of alphabetical sorting, we began placing books on shelves. We were eager to see the fruits of our labors shelved on the beautiful new wood. We had begun early in the morning that day and pushed ourselves to finish putting all fiction in place, along with spy-thriller, another large section genre. Around six that night we were breaking for dinner and Paul happened to touch the cardboard under one section. To his horror it was soaked—lying in wait to reach our books. Nightmare on Elm Street! Like two maniacs who'd just seen Freddy Kruger, we tore our books off the shelves desperately trying to keep some semblance of order after all those days of sorting. Tension was high. Tourist season was upon us. We had bookshelves but they were unusable in the state they were in.
So we did what any normal thinking person would do—early the next day we brought out hairdryers and began drying shelves like a shag haircut. When that didn't work, as soon as the sun made an appearance, Paul broke the shelves down and pulled them into the streets to dry the old-fashioned way—with solar power. We can only imagine what the locals were thinking—Crazy gringos! We dragged wet planks of wood into the street, at one point creating a traffic jam. Picture Laurel and Hardy. What a backwards way to begin a business!
Since patience was neither of our virtues, the next week painfully dragged along. We cut more cardboard and re-tacked it to the shelves. A couple days later all our books were off the floor and on display. On December 20, just in time for winter solstice, we opened our doors.
We were astounded at the goodwill we received on opening. Even though most of our books were in English, many locals read both Spanish and English. We immediately started trading books, requesting more Spanish language books along with German, French and Italian.
The next week we searched Cancun for a humidifier for the store. Equipped with a relative humidity indicator and now a dehumidifier, we managed to control the store humidity to the perfect temp for books—about fifty percent—as explained to us by the manager of Green Apple Books, San Francisco. Any more humidity and the pages don't retain their crispness, any less and the crowns of the books begin to crack and break.
In those days, summer travel wasn't a thing in the Riviera Maya, so we'd close shop and May through August—low season—we headed back to the States for more books, gathering around four thousand additional titles per buying spree. After the first couple years we were up to sixteen thousand books and began to offer new books on the Maya, Maya culture, pyramids, Latin fiction, ecology and the local environment, birds, mammals, fish, and guide books on the region.
We received many accolades as our reputation grew and were written up in numerous travel guides. We were one of six bookstores in the state of Quintana Roo, the only one with a cache of books so large, both in English and Spanish. My favorite write-up came from the Rough Guide to Mexico, stating we were "the largest English language bookstore from Mexico City to Guatemala." Our local customers came from as far away as Chetumal, and we were a common port stop for sailboats sailing down the Caribbean Coast. Though we no longer have the store, it's now in its third rendition, with owners Caleb and Nicole Moss. Twenty three years in business, and a true gem of Puerto Morelos.
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